Re: printing most-negative-fixnum fails

From:

Richard Stallman

Subject:

Re: printing most-negative-fixnum fails

Date:

Fri, 14 May 2004 05:20:41 -0400

This feature is not harmless, because often it causes a window system
to load unnecessary fonts to memory to display some unrelated characters.
And also when it displays strange characters, it confuses users.
Beginning users don't do lots of interactive Lisp evals, so I don't
think we need to worry so much about confusing them. Loading the
fonts might be a more serious issue. However, adding an option is a
very undesirable way to solve such a problem. It is costly in complexity
and will leave many users unsatisfied.
Can anyone think of another idea for how to avoid the problem?